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Through the Keyhole. In Bergman's The Shame (1968), a harrowing antiwar movie, she used the same economy in the entirely different role of a housewife caught with her weak, cowardly husband (Max von Sydow) in the midst of a civil war. The opening scene, in which Liv arose, bare-breasted from her bed in the morning, showed how she could turn a perfectly ordinary moment into something powerful and erotic. Neither teasing nor selfconscious, her sleepy grace gave the character an instantaneous reality that made the audience feel they were looking through the keyhole.
Some actresses, a Glenda Jackson or a Bette Davis, for example, achieve greatness through controlled excess and are bold enough to risk doing too much in mastering a role. Liv can take risks in big scenes too, as in the fit of hysterics she threw in the title role of Bergman's The Passion of Anna (1970). But generally she follows Mies van der Rohe's dictum that less is more. She dares to do too little, and builds a character gesture by gesture, inflection by carefully shaded inflection. In her first major non-Bergman movie, The Emigrants, she does not so much master the character of Kristina as she invents her. At the beginning, she is supposed to be still in her teens; without makeup or camera tricks, she conveys the image of youth as she rides casually on an old swing. The secret is all in the way she grips the ropes with light confidence and catches the rhythm of the swing as if her body had no weight at all. It is a small moment, but in such small moments does Liv demonstrate her virtuosity.
Even before she went to Sweden to collaborate with Ingmar Bergman, with whom she has made five films, Liv was a busy leading lady in the theater, TV and films of her native Norway. She played in everything from Hamlet to Faust to Saint Joan. Her ascendancy in Hollywood is Norway's loss all over again, but Norway is getting used to sharing her with the rest of the world. Professionally, that is. Personally she still spends much of her time there and considers her real home to be the spacious frame house she owns half an hour outside Oslo.
In fact, Liv did not even see Norway or any other part of Scandinavia until she was six. She was born in Tokyo, where her father worked as an aircraft engineer. When the Germans overran Norway in 1940, her family joined many exiles in an area outside Toronto called "Little Norway." There her father served in the Norwegian Air Force while she romped with the royal children, Prince Harald and Princesses Ragnhild and Astrid. In 1943 her father suffered a mishap that was eventually to cost him his life. In a bizarre airfield accident, he walked into a whirring propeller. Sent to another job in New York, he appeared to recover, only to die shortly before the end of the war. As soon as passenger ships could cross the Atlantic, his widow Janna took Liv and her sister (also named Janna), two years Liv's senior, to live in Trondheim, a port city 250 miles north of Oslo.